Numerical Assessment of Indoor Radon Propagation in Residential Buildings

The purpose of this study is to evaluate radon concentration in a room where the radioactive source has reached to the floor by performing CONTAM and FLUENT software packages. A single zone room with defined windows and doors is assessed in this research. In CONTAM software, a simplified control volume method is used while in the FLUENT software, the continuity, momentum, energy, species transport and state equations are solved with finite volume approach and the turbulence effects are involved implicitly in the elliptic part of the momentum equation. An acceptable agreement is seen between numerical results of these two software packages and also between numeric and analytic results. The results show that the most important variable which can affect indoor radon concentration is ventilation air change rate, where the concentration decreases monotonically with that.

Keywords:

Radon , Numerical simulation , ANSYS FLUENT , CONTAM , Indoor air conditions